The second annual California Irish Festival will celebrate the best in Irish cuisine & food trucks, family fun, vendors, live Celtic music, multiple beer gardens, bagpipes and more. All ages are welcome, so bring family and friends are welcome to come to downtown Upland, CA and celebrate the...

Samuel Adams Releases Their Refreshing Summer Lineup

As the weather gets warmer, you might be thinking to yourself “What warm-weather beers would be great to drink?”

Well, Samuel Adams has a lineup for refreshing summer beers, including some new releases this season.

Two beers I want to highlight out of their summer offerings are their Porch Rocker and their brand new Hefeweizen, both of which are light and refreshing, especially on warm weather days. Their Porch Rocker (4.5% ABV) is inspired by German cyclists who mixed beer and lemonade to quench their thirst on a hot summer day. Samuel Adams takes their golden Helles lager and adds a unique blend of lemons to capture that fresh-squeezed lemon taste. There’s some lemonade on nose along with some lemon zest, while there is a wheat taste, some tartness, and some yeastiness on the palate, making for a sessionable lager.

The other one that stood out and would be great on warm weather days is their brand new Hefeweizen (5.4% ABV), which is a solid hefeweizen. With a sweet, banana nose, as well as some coriander and earthiness, it then tastes of coriander and some slight grapefruit on the palate. Owing to its coriander taste, one of my drinking comrades suggested that it seems more like a saison. Either way, I found this new beer to be a tasty, sessionable summer beer.

One beer that's new which is really interesting is their Tropic of Yuzu (6.0% ABV), which features yuzu fruit, with which I had been entirely unfamiliar before drinking this beer. Nevertheless, it's definitely a new and interesting flavor. It tastes like some sort of candy, actually, with fruitiness on the nose and an exotic fruity flavor on the palate. The finish is quite interesting, as it is unexpectedly spicy.

Samuel Adams also has put out, as part of their seasonal offering, their Summer Ale (5.3% ABV), a lemon wheat ale, and their Golden Hour (5.0% ABV), a helles lager. The Summer ale is, as one of my compatriots described it, “the elder statesmen of Samuel Adams summer line”, and it has its classic lemon flavor and is very mild, which makes it a solid choice for summer drinking. Golden Hour is a fine beer, with a muted spicy and herbal nose.

Two other new beers out this season are their Session IPA and Berliner weisse. Their Session IPA (4.5% ABV) tastes perfumy, soapy, and slightly tropical fruity, with some grassiness and dankness at the end of the palate. It’s kind of a west coast session IPA, although I found it to be weak and watery. Even more disappointing, however, is their Berliner weisse (4.8% ABV), which doesn’t have much of an aroma and an indetectable tartness, the latter of which one would expect for the style.

All of these beers are on the lighter side, providing for appropriate drinking for the weather. Two new beers which should be interesting to try would be their Hefeweizen and their Tropic of Yuzu, with their Porch Rocker providing a solid go-to, as well.